Monday, January 23, 2017

A story of jobs and growth that UK business doesn't want told

Everyone's talking about trade deals. And with trade deals, business. For the UK has stuff to sell. Statistics show weapons, cars, drugs, crude and refined oil. But mostly we're selling services.

And this is where it becomes interesting for those of us working in the arts. The arts aren't on in the trade deal agenda. Cars are mentioned, financial services and other exports. But as The Economist warned recently there's no "golden era of trade" coming. I mean, the US bans haggis imports!

Quite a lot is not being told. And consistently off the agenda is a story the Tories themselves describe as one of the UK's greatest successes. The arts and the artists, the writers and publishers, the music and musicians...you get the idea.

Creative industries have created more jobs that any other sector and increased UK exports.

So why are we being force fed the language of monstrous men whose names we can't bring ourselves to mention? Why does the news every morning, at the moment, sound like an episode of Taboo?

Is it because this story will generate panic, envy and fury among those whose vocabulary is governed by phrases such as: going forward, track record, brand awareness, digital penetration, like-for-like. This story of how, against all odds, almost mythically, the uncontrollable, free-thinking, rebellious individuals who make up the creative industries have made good, despite refuting the language of powerpoint, team-building and mission statements.

More than made good, in fact. Ed Vaizey, a former minister for culture spelled it out: "The creative industries are one of the UK's greatest success stories...."

That's me, that's my friends Jane Fordham, David Parfitt, Michaela Ridgway, Suzannah Dunn, David Kendall, Moniza Alvi and many, many more. That's my kids, my ex and my mum. It's my dedicated and inspiring publisher, Arc in Todmorden, Fabrica Gallery in Brighton, it's the Poetry Business in Sheffield and Modern Poetry in Translation, it's PigHog poetry, it's Rich Mix in London and The Dark Horse magazine in Edinburgh. It's AudioActive and all the struggling promotors of music, spoken word, the small presses, the editors, the painters, photographers and curators.

The facts overturn the stereotype of the artist with her head in the clouds who's afraid of business. Of the bumbling creative who's incompetent with cash and figures, of the radical who's ideologically opposed to making money. Because despite ourselves we are generating work and we're good at it.

So this raises questions. Firstly, why suppress a success story? Censor it almost?

Giya Makondo-Wills,
documentary photographer

Is it that we have no lobbyists and vested interests? Is it that we are small and speak our minds? That we satirise the establishment's attempts to pull the wool over our eyes with 'alternative facts', an establishment that would rather ignore the facts and pay subsidies to the failing businesses of friends?

The story at its most basic nests in the Creative Industries Economic Estimates (January 2016), Department for Culture, Media and Sport. A press release from the time states: "The UK's creative industries are now worth a record £84.1 billion to the UK economy....British films, music, video games, crafts and publishing are taking a lead role in driving the UK's economic recovery, according to the latest Government statistics.

"The figures show the sector growing at almost twice the rate of the wider UK economy - generating £9.6 million per hour. And this success is set to last, with a strong line-up of British talent and creativity in 2016 promising yet another blockbuster year ahead."

I'll repeat that: at almost twice the rateof the wider UK economy.....

Vaisey's department found:
- The rise in Gross Added Value (GVA) of the creative industries between 2008 and 2014 was 37.5% higher than any other sector.
- The Creative Economy had grown by a quarter (24.9%) since 2011, at a rate faster than the whole of the UK economy, which grew by 12.1 % over the same period."
- Creative jobs are increasing at a higher rate than the rest of the economy. It is responsible for 1 in 12 UK jobs.
- Exports are increasing.
- The Creative economy has grown by a quarter since 2011 "at a rate faster than the whole of the UK economy, which grew by 12.1 per cent. This rise has primarily been led by the growth of the creative industries."

Mrisi Makondo Wills
musician

A year has passed and Ed Vaizey has been replaced by Matthew Hancock who it seems is best known for setting out on foot to play cricket at the north pole in 2005. He developed frostbite. And perhaps politicians like him and the wild-haired blonds, are why we hear most from the manufacturing lobby promoting their arms, planes, cars, construction, drugs, electronics, plastics, nuclear, furniture, textiles, space inventions, food and drink.

So I'll turn to the late John Berger to explain why the powerful are afraid of the arts: "I can’t tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that art has often judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past has suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. I know too that the powerful fear art, whatever its form, when it does this, and that amongst the people such art sometimes runs like a rumor or a legend because it makes sense of what life’s brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us, for it is inseparable from a justice at last. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts and honor."

In these days of unemployment, of the endless unfolding other world of Twitter, those of us who are in the creative industries must prepare our crib sheets to tell the story no-one wants told.